Enchanted No More

“We need to find your brother,” Aric said.

The knob was warm under her hand and it turned easily. Jenni stepped inside her old home.

Anger slammed against her, pushing her back into a solid Aric.

Rothly’s anger, both directed at her that she dared to come into his space, and a long-term ire that pervaded the place.

Jenni panted through the constriction of her chest, striving to pull a trickle of air into her lungs. An air-and-fire spell directed at them! The spell tightened over them like a net, choking, heating, burning.

Aric shuddered behind her and she turned. He was against the closed door and she was against him. His skin had darkened, taken on a coarser texture more like bark. He was half elf, half-dryad Treefolk, he didn’t need as much air as she.

Faint steam radiated from him, the ends of his hair crisping. She hadn’t felt the fire as much as the air.

Aric was turning browner. His hair became greener, and he’d lost a sizzling inch that sent a fragrance like burning redwood needles into the air.

Rothly had tailored a spell to both of them, to his sister and his friend. Disowning all friendship, all bonds. She and Aric could die!

Jenni widened her stance, struggled to inhale. Any spell Rothly had crafted, she should be able to unravel.

Time was too short to step into the gray mist. She wasn’t prepared. She couldn’t push through Rothly’s spell to reach the older ones that the rest of her family, and she herself, had crafted.

She only had a few seconds.

So she visualized her new home—high, dry Denver, with the thin air of altitude—stripped the humidity from the air of Rothly’s spell and pulled enough in to survive. She leaned against Aric’s solid strength, twined her fingers with his and heated his cooler body to her own skin temperature, sharing the protection of her fire nature. As his temperature equalized to that of the spell, he stopped burning.

Good. She looked at the spell. It was frayed in one corner. Rothly’s magic was crippled. Jenni mentally reached for a loose thread and yanked. The net vanished.

A tremor went through Aric, starting at his feet and raising his hair, accompanied by the sound of rattling leaves. Jenni realized she was still measured against his full length, righted herself and stepped away. She made a show of looking around the living room that hadn’t changed at all as Aric settled.

Something else hit her…but not with a slam, more like a whisper that coated her, sank into her, alerting all her senses. This was not the home she remembered. Her tapestry bag fell from limp fingers.

Scent came first. The fragrance of elf and djinn and human wasn’t as rich, nor were there any individual scents of her brothers and sisters, her parents. Only Rothly, and a crippled Rothly. Anger-fear-despair sweat. The slight hint of decaying magic, the astringency of healing herbs kept as potpourri, burnt as incense, used in bath and on wounds.

He was still crippled, then. Somehow Jenni had had a lingering hope that his wounds weren’t as bad as the last time she’d seen him—on a pallet in the triage area after the ambush. That his arm and magic might have healed a bit.

She grieved and this time the sharp grief wasn’t for her lost siblings and parents, but was for her remaining brother. As she stepped through the house, she understood that she had accepted the deaths of her family. It only needed her to come back here to this empty place for her to understand that.

“It’s not the same,” Aric said. He hadn’t touched her again and she was contrary enough to wish that he still did. “It’s so quiet. I’ve never heard quiet in this place.”

Jenni kept her flinch inside. She’d been ignoring the silence, focusing more on the unwholesome feelings that writhed through the atmosphere.

“Your sisters and brothers…even your parents were always cheerfully loud.”

Jenni gritted her teeth. “That’s right.”

Aric frowned and lines she hadn’t noticed before appeared in his forehead. He was maturing. A small tremble went through her as she did a quick calculation. He was two hundred years old, his seed would be viable soon, and he’d look for a mate. She brushed the thought aside as she feathered her hand over her coat, though the last of the rain droplets had disappeared minutes ago.

“Quiet and smells funny and…it’s out of balance.” His voice had lowered and deepened on the last. He lifted his feet one at a time and the action was slow, as if he pulled invisible roots from the ground below the shabby oriental rug and the flagstones beneath.

Jenni stilled. She’d been concentrating so much on her human senses that she hadn’t noticed. But he was right. From before she’d been born, for a century before that, this land—this house—was equal in all four elemental energies. Now there were equal parts of air and fire, but earth was about a quarter less than it should be. Water was a good two-thirds less than air or fire. The very thought of it shocked her.

After a quick breath, she nodded. “Yes. I’ll fix that before we leave.” The best practice she could have to build her skill set to save Rothly. She needed three balancings at least, with rest in between. But no resting here. “I don’t want to spend the night here. This is Rothly’s home.”

Aric grunted. “Not much of one.” He turned up his hands, spreading his fingers, testing the magic and atmosphere of the place in the way of Treefolk. “Feels like he’s just existing.” Aric’s mouth turned down. He shook his head. “Full of anger and grief.” There was a pause. “Like you, though worse than yours.”

“I’m not crippled,” Jenni said.

“Not physically or magically,” Aric agreed.

Jenni stomped away from him—through the house to the kitchen. It was clean and soulless, though it appeared the same as when her mother and sisters were alive. Jenni and her mother and one of her sisters—the one with more djinn than elf nature—had loved cooking. Together. Jenni’s throat closed and she pushed through the kitchen to the pantry. Her mouth twisted as she recalled that she’d painted her own kitchen the same creamy yellow.

She stopped in the large pantry, turned to the glass-fronted cabinets on her left that were for magical ingredients—and found it full of both the makings for the special tea and the tea itself. Pounds of it, stored in large tin containers. It appeared as if Rothly had made enough for her whole family for a decade—or enough to boost his crippled magic for a vital, dangerous mission?

Her heart simply ached. The tins had been labeled with the date…no more than two and a half weeks ago. After Jenni had refused the dwarf at her door and the mission of the Lightfolk.

Thrusting that thought and guilt away, Jenni flicked her fingers to let the steam roiling within her out and banish negative emotions. She took off her backpack and flipped back the flap, then opened the cabinet. The canister was a large, squarish tin with rounded edges. She took it, pried open the top and sniffed.

A wave of dizziness engulfed her. The edges of her vision grayed and thinned to mist…. This was a prime mixture of the tea. Better than Rothly had ever made before. He’d taken more care with it. He’d had to. He was lucky even a nonmagical human could make the tea…the magic was in when the herbs were cut, how they were dried and the processing itself.

With an impatient shrug, Jenni poured the concoction into a smaller tin, plenty enough to see her through a couple of years of intense daily balancing.

She’d brew the potion to balance this place before she left, as well as filling a few travel vials for emergencies.

Aric watched from the doorway but said nothing. She glanced at him. “Maybe you could check the library.” She cleared her voice. “And Dad’s study to see if Rothly left any notes?”

Nodding, Aric left and Jenni let out a relieved breath. She didn’t think Aric had the nose or the magical sense or training to sort out the mixture of herbs, but she felt better keeping him away from the family secret.

They should have separated the moment they walked into the place. Why had he followed her to the kitchen, the heart of the house when her family had been alive? Maybe he, too, missed them.

The thought insinuated itself into her emotions and she couldn’t rid herself of it. He’d told her that he’d grieved, hadn’t he? She hadn’t allowed herself to believe him. Was she so selfish in her grief? As selfish as Rothly had been. Calming her feelings, she settled into her own balance, unfocused her eyes and murmured the proper words over the tea mixture to reinforce Rothly’s arrhythmic and limping spell. This would boost the magical properties of the herbs, keep them fresh.

When her tin was stowed in her pack, she went to see if Aric had discovered anything. As she entered the hallway bisecting the house, she comprehended that he wasn’t on the ground floor that held the library and den. He wasn’t even in the sunroom that ran the length of the back of the house. He was upstairs where the bed rooms were.

Jenni hadn’t planned on going upstairs, hadn’t wanted to. From what she’d already experienced since she’d walked into the house, she was damn sure that her bedroom wouldn’t be as she had left it.

She hesitated, but couldn’t bear to leave Aric alone with her family’s things. Slowly she took the stairs to the second floor. They creaked beneath her feet. When she turned right at the top of the landing, shadows laddered the hallway. The dim light let in by the window at the end was watery—like tears instead of rain.

The hall was full of silent squares of closed white doors, except one. The door to her parents’ room was open and Aric stood as if frozen outside it. She thought she saw a silver glinting line on his cheek.

“What are you doing here?” She’d wanted her voice to be strong, to snap, but it was barely a whisper disturbing the silence.

“I never got to say goodbye to them, either.” Aric’s words fell stark.

Something inside Jenni just shattered, tearing her patchwork heart back into bits. A liquid cry escaped her, she staggered back and hit the wall and slid down it, dropped her pack as she curled into herself, and wept. Wept like she hadn’t since her family had died.

Before she knew it, Aric sat beside her, gathered her into his arms, next to his warm chest, holding her, shaking himself.

They were my good friends, too, all of them, and I didn’t get to say goodbye, he said mentally.